Sharing games requires outside hosting service. Altered formatting options require relearning advanced techniques. Only built for creating games in the text-adventure niche genre.

Bottom Line

Twine is by far the easiest and most accessible game development tool you can get, as long as the games you want to develop are text adventures.

While it may take years of practice (and a healthy amount of natural talent) to write a great novel or paint a masterpiece, anyone with a pencil and some paper can start scribbling sentences or sketching doodles. One of the biggest hurdles facing game development as an art form is that lack of an easy entry point. There are plenty of great services for learning how to make games, but they require you to wrap your head around coding right from the start, a steep challenge that turns potential new voices away, instead of welcoming them in. Free game-development tool Twine is so important and impressive because it allows anyone to turn their ideas into working games with little to no programming experience—as long as that idea works as a text adventure.

First WordsIf you want to make games like Super Mario Bros. or Minecraft, Twine isn't the creation tool for you. Twine's output is best described as interactive fiction. This term covers a wide range of game types, from a thoughtful and emotional Choose Your Own Adventure-style story on depression to a dumb quiz about the lyrics of the Mac Tonight theme song I banged out in half an hour in my testing. If you can envision your game as a collection of interconnected, text-heavy slides, you can make it in Twine. It's no surprise then that the majority of Twine games favor narrative and dialogue over play mechanics. Besides, text adventures may now be a small niche, but they also represent a classic game genre. Zork, anyone?

Twine's limited scope may turn off some more ambitious budding game creators, but it's also what allows Twine to be as approachable as it is. Whether you're using the desktop app or the new Web browser version, learning Twine's incredibly friendly tools takes no time or technical knowledge.

Add a passage, give it a title and start writing in the basic text editor. Once you're finished, the slide pops up on the story grid. You'll have to do some light coding to turn key words and phrases into links to other passages, but Twine's syntax is super simple. If you link to a passage that doesn't exist yet, the editor automatically generates it, although this didn't always work for me.

As you add more slides and more links between them, the story takes shape before your eyes. You can even rearrange how passages appear on the grid to keep your story organized. There are multiple ways to visualize how slides connect to each other, so you can pull back and ensure your game works as a playable closed loop. You can also add tags and choose how much of a slide you want to be visible at a glance: just the title or the first few sentences of the body text. Be sure to periodically playtest your game as well, in case something is broken.

Advanced FeaturesTwine stories can be nothing but words and connected passages, but because they're essentially Web pages, you can also give your games some added production value if you do know how to code a bit, particularly in HTML. Edit the CSS stylesheet to change visual aspects such as font, background color, and how links are displayed. You can add JavaScript variables as well to, say, track how the player is progressing through your story and change elements accordingly. You can even embed images, video, and other media.

Notable Twine developers have been using those kinds of advanced features for years to add sophistication to their work. Check out games, visuals novels, and creative writing by folks like Anna Anthropy, Michael Lutz, and others as examples. However, the recent Twine 2.0 update changed the way several of these Twine's systems work, frustrating some longtime users.

By default, the new Twine uses a story format called Harlowe that codifies advanced features the community had mostly come up with on its own. This makes official tutorials more useful and easier to find. Unfortunately, the implementation is slightly different than previous solutions to more complex challenges. Code has to be written in a specific, altered structure. So if you were used to the old way of doing certain tasks you'll have to do some relearning. You can also use another story format such as SugarCube that closely resembles 1.x Twine, or just keep using 1.x Twine since it's also still available for download.

The Next StepOnce you export your Twine story, you can play it on your computer or any computer on the same network that can access the files from which it draws. If you want to share your game online, however, you'll have to rely on an outside hosting service. Fortunately, there are several sites dedicated to hosting Twine games. Philome.la is my go-to choice. These sites are also great resources for discovering new Twine games to draw inspiration from.

Playing lots of other Twine games really shows you how versatile the tool can be despite—or perhaps because of—its restrictions. Stephen Colbert even used it to promote The Late Show. The inclusivity that comes with the ease of use also means that Twine games typically feature themes and styles far more radical, experimental, and progressive than average video games, because of the diverse pool of creators.

The flip side of this is that Twine won't necessarily teach you the technical game design skills you can parlay into a career in the AAA games industry. Branching storylines are becoming increasingly prominent in big games, and Twine developers have certainly had success elsewhere in the field, but if you want to learn how to make games across more traditional genres check out our Editors' Choice educational services Youth Digital and Lynda.com.

EntwinedRefining your work, looking back on it over a period of time and making sure it's the best it can be, is an essential part of the artistic process. But so is immediately expressing exciting embryonic thoughts swirling around in your brain. There's a reason musicians have jam sessions. Twine tears down the technical obstacles keeping most people from experiencing that kind of fantastic free-flowing creativity in game development. Other programs help a certain type of person make any type of game. Twine helps any person make a certain type of game.

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About the Author

Former PCMag intern Jordan Minor is a senior editor at sister site, Geek.com, and really just wants to use his fancy Northwestern University journalism degree to write about video games. He's previously written for Kotaku, The A.V. Club, Cards Against Humanity, and 148Apps. In his spare time, he also writes dumb screenplays that occasionally become... See Full Bio

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